ITA: you are never too old to achieve great things
Despite a 60-year media career, Ita Buttrose’s greatest challenge may yet lie ahead of her. She talks to Genevieve Gannon about the importance of role models, and self-belief.
The pearls in Ita Buttrose’s earrings are catching the afternoon light as she gazes across the turquoise vista of Sydney Harbour and makes a shocking pronouncement: “I’ve taken on jobs sometimes when I’ve thought, what have I done?” She mimes fear and there’s a moment of surprise in the hotel room before she continues: “But then I’ve always had this belief that I would be able to do it. Always.” And order is restored.
The former editor’s accomplishments are well documented. She has been canonised by Cold Chisel and dramatised on TV. Now the paper giant has become a plastic miniature. Ita Buttrose has been turned into a Barbie. The 28 centimetres of rubber, with Ita’s signature bob and pointed black heels, sits on a table by the harbour view, and stands as a testament to what an important figure Ita is. And though the face of the Ita “Shero” doll has Barbie’s stock features, there’s something about her, and the tiny newspaper poking out of her handbag, that does capture that distinct
Ita panache.
“I’m really thrilled,” the former editor of The Weekly says, admiring the figurine made in her image, to her specifications. “I’ve done a lot in my life but I’ve never imagined being a Barbie doll.”
Barbie is a toy with a chequered record on women’s empowerment, but the “Shero” 2019 line, in which the Ita Barbie represents Australia alongside more than 20 other inspiring women across the globe, is part of its creators’ multi-pronged bid to be more inclusive. The woman who used Bingo to increase The Sunday Telegraph’s circulation knows the value of populist methods for delivering a message which, in this case, is that girls can grow up to be anything.
“That’s part of this campaign,” Ita says. “There’s nothing you can’t do. It’s important that we instil in girls that they have to believe in themselves.”
It’s a message she is passionate about, and apart from a moment of disbelief, she didn’t have any hesitation in agreeing to join the ranks of Amelia Earhart and Ava DuVernay as a “Shero” doll.
“It’s an honour to be recognised, along with other women around the world who are all making their mark in various ways,” Ita says.
At the same time, another more significant announcement was brewing in the backrooms of Parliament. The week before the Ita doll was unveiled, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced the editor and broadcaster would be appointed chair of the ABC board. At 77, and only the second woman to occupy the post, Ita sees her new role as yet another opportunity to rattle community perceptions of what women can do and when.
When The Weekly meets Ita she is yet to be briefed on her new role, and so will not answer questions about it, but what she does say aligns with our understanding of her as a trailblazer and leader.
“I hope my recent appointment as chair of the ABC will encourage other older women to realise there are still mountains to climb and you shouldn’t put a blinker on yourself,” Ita says.
“I always say to people, don’t put blinkers on yourself. Don’t put blinkers on when you’re a young woman, but you shouldn’t put them on when you’re older either. Just because you’re older doesn’t mean you’re not accomplished. It doesn’t mean you can’t achieve. You’ve got to believe in yourself.”
Ageism is perhaps one of the remaining obstacles Ita has to dismantle. Her career ascension coincided with a time of radical social change, and the daughters and granddaughters born after she left The Weekly in the early 1980s to “feminise” Rupert Murdoch’s Sydney newspapers for him, might be shocked to learn the woman who presided over one of the most successful magazines in the world was unable to get a department store charge card without a man’s signature.
“You can’t admit that fission of fear you might feel,” she says of taking on the role at News Limited. “There’s always a fission of fear when you get a big appointment like that because you want to do the best.”
Growing up in Sydney’s pretty Parsley Bay in the 1950s, Ita Clare Buttrose’s days began and ended with a meal and the news. In the morning she made a pot of tea and prepared eggs and toast for her father Charles Buttrose, then news editor of Sydney’s Daily Mirror, before he left for the office around 7am.
“We talked about newspapers,” Ita says. “We talked about the news. We talked about the day’s events. I just found my father’s life really fascinating.”
At night, dinner would be accompanied by the ABC’s 7pm news broadcast.
“We all had to shut up and listen to the news, and if anyone talked we got into trouble,” Ita says.
By the time he retired, Ita’s father was the Assistant General Manager for our national broadcaster, a fact that helped Ita understand the culture of the ABC “particularly well”, she says.
“I wish my Dad was alive to see me here today,” she told the press conference announcing her appointment.
A fundraiser and publicist, Ita’s mother Mary set a rare example of what a woman could achieve outside the home. Despite this, the career plans of the teenage girls of Parsley Bay extended only so far as their wedding days. Like her girlfriends, teenage Ita was an apprentice housekeeper, performing domestic tasks like taking her youngest brother to school and baking sponge cakes on Sundays for dessert. By the time she was 13 she could cook a full family dinner. It’s ironic that the part of this preparation for a career as a homemaker which involved starting the day absorbing her father’s work cemented her desire to become a journalist.
Creativity and ambition abounded in Parsley Bay, where Ita’s next door neighbour, and future director of Picnic at Hanging Rock and
The Truman Show, Peter Weir, was “always organising concerts and plays”. However, the prevailing view for the fairer sex was that work was something to fill time before matrimony.
Ita left high school at 15 to begin her working life as a copy girl at The Australian Women’s Weekly, and it was here that she was exposed to a whole phalanx of role models. The fact that the senior editorial staff
“You’ve just got to accept that you will meet obstacles.”
members were all Mrs and Misses – “We didn’t have Ms back then,” Ita says – may not seem remarkable now, but was extraordinary for the time.
“They were fantastic,” Ita says. “They were extremely competent, talented, experienced women journalists. Some of them had been war correspondents. Nan Musgrove had been the first woman in the press gallery. They were really skilful journalists and they really knew their business.”
If she didn’t start her career alongside this cadre of capable women, who strode around the then-ACP owned Park Street offices brandishing pages of copy, would she have been inspired to aim for the heights she did?
“I don’t know,” Ita says honestly. “It’s an interesting question.” The notion gives her pause.
“They must have been role models to me without me even realising that because I could see what they could all do and I don’t think I ever thought I couldn’t.”
Ita has particularly fond memories of one editor, Tilly Shelton-Smith. “She always had time for me,” Ita says. “If I’d done something in particular that she liked or that was up to scratch, she would make a remark about it.”
This was an era when, “you weren’t showered with a lot of praise and if you did something wrong you could be showered with plenty of correction.” So encouragement was cherished.
Ita’s first stint at The Weekly was a short one. She spent just three months there before landing a secretarial job at The Daily Telegraph. In 1958, she became a cadet reporter. When she boldly put her hand up for the role of editor of the paper’s women’s section, half the staff resigned to protest the job being given to someone so young.
“I sat in the somewhat Spartan office of the Women’s Editor, with its compensatory, fabulous view across Hyde Park to St Mary’s Cathedral and the harbour and wondered what the hell I had done,” Ita wrote in her autobiography, A Passionate Life.
The following period, which was documented in the TV series Paper Giants, was one of triumph. Ita leapfrogged to Cleo and later The Australian Women’s Weekly. Despite proving her editorial mettle in magazines, the reception that greeted her when she returned to The Daily Telegraph as editor-in-chief was hostile. There had never been a woman in the upper echelons of the hierarchy before.
“I was often on boards and I was the only woman there, so you were working with men who didn’t expect to see women in these roles,” Ita says. “I could whinge and whimper about some of the things but I think you’ve just got to accept that you will meet obstacles and it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman, you’re going to meet them. So you look at them and you think, there has to be
a way around this obstacle. I’m going to find it.”
She enters this next phase of her long career, as the chair of the national broadcaster, under far different circumstances. When the government was presented with a list of male executives who could replace Justin Milne as chair, Prime Minister Scott Morrison intervened and asked Ita if she would do it.
“Australians trust Ita, I trust Ita,” the Prime Minister said in a statement laden with praise.
His sentiment was echoed almost universally. Even Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, in complaining about the government’s decision to set aside the independently chosen shortlist of candidates, couldn’t deny Ita’s merit. Asked what she thinks of the fact that the shortlist comprised men only, Ita won’t be drawn: “You know as much about that as I do.” It’s a hint of that toughness that Scott Morrison spoke of when he proudly unveiled his captain’s pick.
If there’s one thing she hopes to achieve during her time at the ABC and beyond, it’s to continue to be a role model for women of all ages. Many of her friends say they feel a creeping sense of invisibility as they grow older, she says. Her profile has meant she has never personally felt discriminated against, but she’s acutely aware of Australians’ propensity to sideline more senior members of the community, particularly women.
“It’s one of those areas in which
I’ve spent a lot of time working, and I’m trying to correct it,” Ita says.
Following the lead of her one-time mentor, Miss Shelton-Smith, who went off to China when she was about 75, Ita found travel was a way to defy narrow community expectations: “I took my aunt to Italy when she was 75. She’d never been overseas. I said, ‘You can’t leave the planet without going to Paris and London and Rome.’
“We got to Rome and she said, ‘Those men over there are looking at you.’
“I said, ‘Don’t be stupid, I’m invisible.’ And she said, ‘Not to them you aren’t’. So I do say to people, ‘if you’re feeling invisible, go to Italy.’”
Ita laughs at the story, but then reiterates that she does see real problems with the way the world deals with women as they age. The causal link that some men make between women’s physical appearance and value is hard to break.
“Women know they’re discriminated against in the workforce if they’re older,” she says.
Asked who she would nominate as a “Shero”, Ita choses cricketer Ellyse Perry. “She’s had a fantastic summer of cricket,” Ita says. “She made a very good speech about her year. We tend to see cricket very much as a male sport, yet women’s cricket is emerging.”
During her time as editor-in-chief at News Limited, Ita was also patron of the NSW Women’s Cricket Association. “At that time they could not get any sponsorship and they came to me to see if I could suggest anything, and then it occurred to me that there wasn’t any women’s sport in our paper.
“I went and had a chat with the sports editor. I said I needed a page for women’s sport. Well, you would have thought I was suggesting porn.” Ita smiles. “Once he got over the shock, we introduced women’s sport. Just one page, but it was a start.”
She’s pleased to note the NSW women’s cricket team wouldn’t have the same trouble getting a sponsor now, but adds, “It would be very good if they could get the same kind of pay as the men’s side,” continuing a recurring theme of the interview, and her career.
“When you look back at how it was there have been vast improvements,” she says.
Times have changed since the era when raisin toast was the height of culinary sophistication and the editor of one of the most successful magazines in the world couldn’t get a bank loan because she was a woman, but, as
Ita says, “That’s not to say there’s still not room to move.”
“Women know they’re discriminated against in the workforce if they’re older.”